It’s always a good move to have some form of public status page when you run a large online service. This could be a status blog or a purpose-built website like the Google Apps Status Dashboard. This approach not only promotes transparency but also gives companies a central point of information to refer their users to.

That won’t stop people from talking, though.

The real-time, online discussion

The public, real-time discussion of service outages that take place on Twitter is interesting, and a testament to how people have become more or less dependent on Gmail and similar online services. In addition to this, Gmail has so many users that a large number of people will be affected even by brief outages (which they then talk about online).

There are also a lot of people who use Twitter as an indicator to see if services are having problems. This whole “check on Twitter if others have the same problem as I am” is a pretty interesting phenomenon. We stumbled upon this tweet that sums it up nicely:

Social media sites like Twitter are rapidly becoming the go-to place for status information about large online services such as Gmail. A kind of crowdsourced error detection.

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About the Royal Pingdom blog

This blog is the place for official news about Pingdom the company and our products and services.
You will also find tips about our services, such as our website monitoring, real user monitoring,
transaction monitoring, and more.

We also ramble and muse about technology in general, and the Internet and web technology, in particular.